The history of video game consoles and the companies behind them is a very long, complicated, and eventful story that spans over 60 years. When talking about video games its best to know exactly what a video game is. A video game is a device that projects a game onto a screen with all of the games visuals on the screen.

A lot of people believe that the first video game was the Atari 2600, but actually this was more like the 15th. A man named William Higginbotham was the first person to create a fully functional video game, graphics and all. This game was called “Tennis for two” and was played on a screen very similar to the radar screens you would see on submarines. On October 18th, 1958, in the Brookhaven National Laboratory the first video game ever created was open to the public to play.

William Higginbotham was the first person to create a fully functional video game, but seven years prior, way before Higginbotham’s “Tennis for Two” a man named Ralph Baer came up with the idea. Ralph Baer was a young TV engineer in the 1950’s. One day his boss asked him to create “The world’s greatest television set”. So he went to work, he thought about what would make his television unique, what would make it the best. Then he got the idea of playing a game, right on the TV! When Ralph presented the idea to his boss, he rejected it.

In 1966, Ralph Baer decided to create prototypes of his idea, seven to be exact. In 1968 Ralph finished his final prototype, the Brown Box. From then on Ralph went from television company to television company trying to sell his idea. Finally, in 1971, Baer signed an agreement with Magnavox, and in May 1972, the first commercial home video game console was created, the Odyssey.

After Magnavox created their home video game console, the Odyssey, other companies followed suit. One of the companies was named Atari. Atari started out with a single console, but with over 30 million systems sold and thousands of game to date, over next 40 years from the 1970’s, Atari became known as the godfather of video games.

The 1970’s was a very interesting time for video games; they did just explode onto the market after all. There wasn’t a city in America that didn’t have an arcade or game shop. Arcade games where so popular in fact it inspired many companies to create home versions of the cabinets. In 1975 Atari made one of the most iconic video games in history, Pong. In 1976, the first cartridge based home console was created called the “Channel F”. The game industry saw that cartridge based systems were the future and soon started creating their own. Soon after, Atari created their own cartridge based system called the Atari 2600.

Atari was dominating the industry in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. It looked as if nothing could loosen its iron grip. Atari’s downfall never came from a final blow via a competing company; its ultimate downfall came from its own success. Atari went from a fun, and laid back workplace to a corporately run hell hole. Through Atari’s success they increased in size, hired more employees, and became more serious, instead of fun and laid back like they used to be. After a while the programmers got fed up with Atari and left to make the own companies. Over the next few years the video game market was drowning in third party lackluster games for the Atari 2600, most of the games were only half finished and the general public found them god awful. After a little while, one of the most profitable industries in the world crashed, this was known as “the video game crash of 1983”. Two years after the market crashed, the industry was reborn into its third generation, its golden age.

Nintendo has been around since 1889, back then though they were making playing cards in Japan called Hanafunda Cards. In 1959, Nintendo signed an agreement and started making playing cards for Disney. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that Nintendo got into the video game business, and from then on Nintendo thrived in the industry. Even now, Nintendo is in the top three video game companies in the world, right up there in the rankings with Sony and Microsoft.

Nintendo got its start in the video game industry when they began working with Mitsubishi Electronics to create video game arcade cabinets. In 1981, the current CEO of Nintendo at the time, Hiroshi Yamauchi, had Shigeru Miyamoto to create an arcade cabinet of their own, Donkey Kong. In 1985, Nintendo released their very own home video game console, the Nintendo Entertainment System (or NES for short) and Super Mario Bros, another one of Miyamotos creations. In 1986, another one of Shigeru Miyamotos creations was released, the Legend of Zelda. By 1988, Nintendo had sold over 7 million NES consoles.

With all these new video game companies, there were bound to be some bad eggs. Violent and inappropriate video games scared parents, how where they suppose to shield their children from these horrible games? In the early 1990’s a new video game was released, way more violent than the head stomping mass murderer Mario. In 1992, the video game cabinet called Mortal Kombat was released and in all of the major arcades across America. Mortal Kombat featured decapitation and disembowelment and a few other things I’d rather not say. Mortal Kombat was so violent in fact, it encouraged the U.S Government into making a game/age ranking system called the ESRB. Mortal Kombat did not get pulled off the market; it got rated just like any other game. Mortal Kombat did get censored though, in the home versions of the game, the blood was changed to the color grey and was called sweat; they also removed all the bloodiest finishing moves. Sega on the other hand, found a work around to the censoring and implemented a cheat code that would take off all the censoring.

In the 1980’s, a company with the name of Sony started to work on computers, and in 1988 Sony helped Nintendo to create a CD-Rom drive for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Sony’s cooperation with Nintendo was their biggest opportunity to get into the game industry, and they took it.

In 1991, Sony officially announced that they would be creating a video game console of their own, the Play Station (two words). This new console could play CD-ROMs, Sony Super Discs and SNES cartridges, Nintendo’s system. This made Nintendo furious. Later, Nintendo announced that they would be partnering up with Philips, Sony’s rival, to create a CD-ROM drive using the same technology Sony was, and Sony didn’t appreciate it. By Nintendo making their announcement, not only did they break their contract with Sony, but they also broke an unspoken law in Japanese business by choosing a foreign company over a Japanese one, so in short Nintendo took some heat. Nintendo however paid no penalty because Sony had been involved with Philips too when they worked together to build the Philips CD-I.

By 1992, the whole Sony/Nintendo scandal had blown over and it was all about the new and next thing. The “next thing” was Sony’s new console, the PSX or Playstation X. The first Play Station never made it out of the factories, nobody knows why exactly but many think it’s because Nintendo and Sony agreed not to have the Play Station use SNES tech, and that’s exactly what the PSX didn’t have. The Playstation X was meant to be a pure gaming machine, and one of the big selling points was a heavy emphasis on 3D visuals. On December 3rd, 1994, the Playstation X was released in Japan, and Sony’s long life began in the industry.

Microsoft has always been in the electronic and computer business. From the 1980’s and 1990’s, Microsoft was creating and publishing computer operating systems. When the 2000’s hit, Microsoft did something surprising, but a little risky. On March 10th, 2000 Bill Gates hinted at a thing called “The Xbox”. Many people speculated that it was a set-top box; others thought it was a new computer you could plug your television into. On January 6th, 2001, the Xbox was officially revealed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas. This marks the day Microsoft finally pushed their way into the gaming industry, and the start of the Xbox’s short but eventful life.

By the year 2005, or the 7th generation consoles, Sega had dropped out of the console wars and Atari had become nothing more than a video game publisher. The only companies left standing in the console wars were Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Many call these companies the “Big Three”. These companies all had unique business plans that worked for them. Sony had the best technology but the highest price point of the three, but the major selling point was its free online service. Nintendo had the lowest price point of the three, but also the lowest technology. Lastly, Microsoft had the technology and games to rival Sony plus a lower price point, but a turn off for many people is that the online service was premium and not free. By 2007 all of the 7th generation consoles were out on the market, and video games had moved from simple machines that played Pong to extremely high tech power machines that played games that where mainly story driven pieces of art. In a game called Gears of War (SPOILERS) a corporal named Dominic Santiago, in the imaginary army called the Coalition of Ordered Governments, lost his wife Maria Santiago and died later on sacrificing himself to save you. Video games today are not just about seeing how many people you can take down, or what your best score is. Video Games today are entire worlds you can explore, they have a story, and characters that have personalities you either love or hate.

In the recent months, video games have been taking a lot of heat. A shooting in a school called Sandy Hook Elementary sparked a lot of talk about gun restrictions. About a week after the shooting, the NRA was getting blamed. They were scared of losing their rights to there guns, so they looked for a scapegoat, video games. A week after the shooting the NRA held a news conference in Washington and the NRAs top lobbyist, Wayne LaPierre, stated in his speech that the video game industry is "In a race to the bottom, many conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate, and offend every standard of civilized society, by bringing an even more toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty right into our homes," after his speech he refused any questions.

Video games are not the cause of violence no more than books, music, or television is. The reason people blame video games is because it’s easier than blaming yourself. Many parents today shun violent video games and blame the industry for making their kids play them. Some organizations like MAVAV (Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence) want these games completely pulled off the market and banned so there kids can’t get them. The fact is that the industry takes all the necessary precautions to prevent adolescents from getting their hands on these games. When going to a store to buy a video game that’s rated Mature, the store requires you to show an I.D or they won’t allow you to purchase that game. The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 also both have customizable parental controls, where a game that’s a rating you don’t like will immediately be rejected and won’t run in the machine. In my opinion, these parents who blame the industry for there out of control kids need to stop pointing their fingers at video games and start pointing them at the right people, themselves.

Even now with our immense technology, the gaming community looks towards the future of “what’s next” and does not appreciate for the most part what we have now and where we have come from. I have always believed that humans are insatiable creatures, never satisfied with what we have now and always looking for the new and next thing. I believe that this desire can push the gaming community to its limits and lead the industry to some very interesting places.

~ Devin D.

I wrote this for school so I missed a few things in this post such as the PSN outage of 2011, and a little more detail about Sega, if i added everything this would have been aaaaaaalllllloooooottttt longer. but the chunk of what i wanted to say is here. If there's anything you think is seriously missing go ahead and sound off in the comments below.